John Hopkins, our Golf Correspondent and a nifty player of a mashie-niblick, is away this week, leaving the Spike Bar column in the hands of a hapless hacker, if not (I hope) a hapless hack. Golf is in my blood. My father was a reasonable club pro and county-standard amateur who still plays off a handicap of five as he nears 60, but none of the genetic material was passed on.

This isn’t false modesty. During the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale this year, I played a three-ball with John and Peter Dixon, another Times colleague, at Hesketh Golf Course. On the first tee, I topped the ball, jarring my wrists on the downswing so that for the first couple of holes I developed an annoying shank. John and Peter kindly waited at each green for me to arrive half a dozen strokes behind them, puffing and swearing to myself.

At times like those, the wise words of Brian Johnston keep on coming to mind. Famous as a cricket commentator, Johnners also liked a round of golf but was pretty poor at it. No matter for his philosophy was this: “Far better to be a bad golfer than a good one. A good golfer comes to the 19th hole thinking only of the few bad shots he hit all day, while a bad golfer’s mind is full of his few good shots.”

It certainly make the post-round pint feel better. There we were in the Hesketh clubhouse and John, who had just birdied the last after his approach hit the flag, was tut-tutting about the odd drive that went astray. I, by contrast, was delighted that I’d finally played a few holes in something approaching single-bogey.

It reminds me of the line in one of the PG Wodehouse stories about the novice golfer who comes in after a modest round brimming with excitement. “Did you have a good game?” he is asked. “Oh yes,” comes the reply. “I just hit three perfect putts on the final green.”

Still, if you are a bad golfer and honest about it then you can be excused the odd moment of bragging when something finally goes right. To which end, let me tell you about my eagle the other week. The first one of my career and it came at Great Braxted, in Essex, where I nearly drove on to the green at the short par-four 5th and then holed a putt of what I later worked out was 41 paces (let’s call it 120 feet). It almost made up for the two tens elsewhere on the card...

No one was there to tape it, sadly, but it bore comparison to Terry Wogan’s fine putt on Pro-Celebrity Golf in 1980, which you can see here. I wasn’t wearing such a silly hat, however.

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Hero of the week: give three cheers and raise a glass of something chilled for young Chris Wood, the 20-year-old who won the silver medal for the leading amateur at the Open. In his first start as a professional at the SAS Masters, Wood had four rounds of 72 or better to come eighteenth and earn £16,000. His inward nine in the second round and his outward nine in the third took only 61 strokes.

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Wood’s fine start got me thinking about how other winners of the Open’s silver medal fared in the big bad professional world. Justin Rose, of course, had a shocker of a time after chipping in at the last at Royal Birkdale in 1998 and heading for the paid ranks with the cheers of thousands ringing in his ears. He missed 21 cuts in a row and had to wait until 2002 before getting his first professional win.

The leading amateur in the year after Rose was a certain Luke Donald, although in the horrid conditions at Carnoustie it was unsurprising that he failed to make the cut. Mikko Ilonen, the best amateur in 2000, also missed the cut by one stroke. A year later, now as a professional, the Finn returned to the Open and came ninth.